Da’Shawn Hand is a five-star defensive end from Woodbridge, Va. According to 247Sports.com, he has strong interest in Michigan, Alabama, Florida, LSU and Southern California.

Hand also has, at this moment, 6,711 Twitter followers. Top-flight defensive tackle Matt Elam has more than 5,000 followers on his account.

It’s probable that more than a few of those are fans who want nothing more than to see their team land an elite player. For all the work recruiting coordinators, head coaches and assistants due to lure elite prospects, fans, in some cases, take it upon themselves to be just as zealous about pitching their respective programs.

So pronounced is their perceived influence, fans themselves have been recruited by coaches to push the sizable recruiting rock forward. The problem: It’s against NCAA rules.

Earlier this week, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops joined Vanderbilt coach James Franklin and Kentucky receivers coach Tommy Mainord in acknowledging the influence of fans—and asking for their help.

“That’s something that’s becoming a part of it,” Stoops to Rivals.com when asked about fans contacting recruits on Twitter. “We may hire you to govern our social media with fans…I’m not kidding. I don’t see it stopping. Once things get rolling, it’s not stopping.”

With that in mind, Stoops says: “You hear that OU fans? We have to get on board.”

There are at least two major problems here. First, it’s an NCAA violation. While the reality is that there is no way the NCAA can govern the actions of fans. A fan contacting recruits is not against the rules, but it does incredibly (ridiculously?) turn them from fan to booster status, Oklahoma State assistant athletic director of compliance, Ben Dyson, told SportsGrid.com. By asking said fan/booster to reach out to recruits, coaches are therefore breaking recruiting rules.

But the temptation for coaches is hard to resist.

“Social media has completely changed recruiting,” Franklin said on 104.5 The Zone in Nashville. “What I mean by that is if you have a crazy fan base, if you’ve got a fan base that has 105,000, they love their team, and now they are all involved in social media, and they are blowing up these kids on Twitter all the time.”

That brings us to the second problem with coaches encouraging fan recruiting: these players are still high school kids. Yes, they are well known and coveted. But that doesn’t mean they should be harassed by fans. Their decision on where to go to school is their own.

“They were like, ‘If you don’t come to our school, we’ll kill you and your family’ and ‘We know where you live,’ Prince told the Washington Post. “Somehow they got my number and FaceTimed me, flashing guns and saying stuff. But they didn’t block their number or anything, so they weren’t too smart.”